Name: Redesigning America's Digital Infrastructure
Uploaded: 2026-05-04T16:31:00Z
Duration: 21 min 7 s
Description: Joe Gebbia, Airbnb co-founder and U.S. Chief Design Officer, and design pioneer Peter Arnell discuss their work with the National Design Studio, a newly formed federal initiative aimed at modernizing the United States government's digital infrastructure.

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Joe Gebbia, Airbnb co-founder and U.S. Chief Design Officer, and design pioneer Peter Arnell discuss their work with the National Design Studio, a newly formed federal initiative aimed at modernizing the United States government's digital infrastructure. Photo: Nikki Ritcher for WSJ

https://m.wsj.net/video/20260504/f913a6d4-f65c-4673-baa5-265bc8ee731e/1/hls/manifest-hd-wifi.m3u8

Joe Gebbia, Airbnb co-founder and U.S. Chief Design Officer, and design pioneer Peter Arnell discuss their work with the National Design Studio, a newly formed federal initiative aimed at modernizing the United States government's digital infrastructure.

Redesigning America's Digital Infrastructure

But Joe, before we get started, I have a burning question. When you guys created Airbnb, how long did you obsess over what letters would be capitalized in the initials? Haven't you all wondered this question? And are you mad when people still write it Air, then capital B?

It drives me crazy.

Same.

It's the ultimate typo. Look, you know, the original name of the company may not be widely known. You know, we hosted three guests on airbeds in our apartment in San Francisco in 2007, which gave us this idea to "What if anybody could host people in their home when they traveled?" And so the original site was called Airbed & Breakfast, which was since truncated to Airbnb, a little more consumer friendly. I don't recommend 18 character URL for any entrepreneurs out there.

No, and you managed to slim it down even more by taking the capitalization out. I love it. And obviously, you know, while there's a lot more to design than that kind of design choice, it is an example of kind of the detail that you sometimes, I'm sure both of you have, like, found yourself in these situations where like an hour later you're like, why have we been talking about the capitalization of one letter for the last hour? But I love it. Okay, so let's talk about the National Design Studio. We never had one, not in recent memory. Why do we need one now?

It's a great question, one I was asking myself the same question about this time last year, in April of 2025. Had entered the government for a six-month stint to fix a very broken process for federal employees when they go to retire. You know, it's a great perk to have in the government, the retirement, you know, package. But the process to get it once you decide to leave the government is incredibly underwhelming, I would say incredibly frustrating. It's a six-month process. It's all based on paper, was all based on paper, and it was riddled with errors and issues. If you missed a form field or a signature, you only found out months later and had to return to go and start it all over again. People had no idea how much their check was gonna be until it arrived months later. This is like kind of an injustice, I think to, you know, civil servants who give us the best years of their life to go through this obstacle course of this maze of a process. In fact, it was so complicated they had to do two required online trainings just to figure out how to retire from the federal government. So they asked me to come in and say, "Hey, Joe, you know something about great user experience. Can you bring this online once and for all?" And in fact, the government had been trying to do this for 20 years since the Bush administration in 2002. They spent $100 million dollars trying to do this, digitize this process unsuccessfully. And in the course of about six months, with me and four of my peers from Silicon Valley, we brought the process entirely online, and we rapidly, you know, fixed the way that people retire from six months to, in some cases, six minutes.

And then the president made an executive order to create the National Design Studio.

I wish it was that simple.

Was that? Yeah, what...

So what happened next was while I'm on campus in D.C. working on this initiative, word got around that for less than a million dollars with five people, we were able to solve this problem that had been, you know, beleaguered in the government for many decades. And so cabinet secretaries started calling me, I started getting introduced to people in the White House, saying, "Hey, can you come do that for us?" And it sparked this bigger idea of, "Well, wait a second. Maybe there's a bigger initiative here. Maybe this isn't doing one agency at a time, of which there's hundreds of agencies." You'd never do that. What if there was a sort of top-down approach to actually modernizing the government in a way that I think we would all expect in 2026 of the United States? And so that started, the gears began to turn and, you know, it sort of led us, well, what if there was a design studio where you could attract the best and brightest talent across?

But isn't that like doing a quick donut in a oil tanker? Like, you know? It's like how do you steer a ship that's been steadily going in a certain direction for decades?

You might think so. There's a lot of stories about how we have and are doing that. But this whole thing led to a pitch that ultimately I got to the Oval Office and gave the president, which was simply this, at a certain point in history, people used to access the government by walking into buildings. And when they did, the lobbies of those buildings are beautifully designed. They're extravagant, and we know this 'cause you can see them in D.C. And the reality is that the way people access the government is through a website. So why wouldn't we give websites the same investment, care to design and attention that we used to give those lobbies? 'Cause that's the actual front door to the government. So let's imbue it with great design. Let's imbue it with great usability. Let's imbue it with making things simple and clear.

And you built a team.

Yes. And so I made a promise to the president. I said, "Mr. President, I will procure the best talent of our time." And so I've been able to pull in some of the best talent from Silicon Valley across design, across software engineering, and the team's expanding today. And so I'm very excited to announce the addition of our team with somebody who has stewarded brands and identities and graphic design for four decades at the highest levels of culture. And it's my pleasure to announce here on stage with you that Peter Arnell is joining National Design Studio as the first US Chief Brand Architect.

Nice. Good job. So that brings me to my first question for you, Peter. When you look at government websites, do your eyes bleed?

Yes.

Yes. Succinct.

First of all, thank you, everybody, and thank you for having us today. There's so much activity going on in the studio now in Washington, and the most important thing is to build unity and define clarity around that publicly so that people could anticipate the great, you know, and important experiences that Joe and the team have been building. And so it's very, very interesting when you talk about 27,000 websites and on and on, that's an interesting challenge.

Yeah, there's 27,000 .gov websites and they wanna overhaul them all, which I think that's a lot. I think even starting with 10 or 20 would be a herculean effort. But it's impressive. Is it a rebrand? I know branding is your forte. Is this a rebrand? And if so, what are the messages that you wanna convey in a rebrand?

Yeah, so United States of America is the greatest brand in the world. So this is a very special and different perspective on the word brand in the sense that we're not rebranding this country, of course. What we're trying to do is very specifically have a consistency, unified look and feel, and experience so that we start to build trust in the way that the American citizen, you know, daily interacts with the government. And we are convinced that we can get that going in a very, very powerful way.

So how much is this... The entering the building metaphor really works for me because we've all walked into these government buildings, fewer and fewer occasions to nowadays, as you point out, but like, it's still something we've all done. But then you go to Room 32B in the back and get in line and there's someone who might yell "Next" every 30 minutes. How much of this is mechanics that you have control over? And how much of it is stuff that there's a whole bureaucracy that's in place that you can't mess with?

There's something that's very special about this particular administration, which is that if I were to sum it up, it's about building. There's a spirit of building right now in D.C. like never before, and certainly on the digital infrastructure side, just as much as anything else. And that's where we come in. So we have a incredibly proficient technical team of some of the best software engineers I've ever worked with in my career. And the reason that this works is because at the highest, highest levels, from the president to the chief of staff, Susie Wiles, to the cabinet members, this is a mandate and it's an exciting one. I think if you went through any agency and you said, "Hey, would you like to upgrade and be the equivalent of a best-in-class consumer-grade app on the internet?" Everybody says, "Yes, yes, we would." And so now we've actually been able to finally align the interest of agencies, the cabinet members that run them through up to the White House and with the Executive Order America by Design.

So then what happens? I mean, it's great, and I think that makes sense to me, but then the hard work begins, the sleeve rolling up begins.

Yes.

What is that like? That must be a messy process.

Well, sure, I mean, anytime you're either building something new or in some cases, you know, fixing the old thing, you know, it's not always straightforward, but I think the incentives are aligned and I think the output of what we're doing really will give three things to Americans. The first is time back. So with one of the things that we've built that we've prototyped, the process to get something done that's a very common flow on a government website takes 87 clicks. In what we've built, it's whittled down to 12 unoptimized. And I think we'll probably get that under 10. So there's a 10x improvement to the time to get a very, very popular user flow done on a government agency. And I think that translates to just time back in people's lives. Second thing is I think we're gonna give people dignity back. We're trying to navigate the maze of government websites and getting lost or a page timing out, and you lost all your data and you gotta go back and start over, which is a very common thing by the way. And it's a feeling like, "Oh, I'm not really in control here, you know? These systems are too complicated." I think we can give people dignity back, but you don't necessarily feel, you know, like you're just lost in this maze of things. And the third thing is I think we can deliver pride. I think people will actually be exceptionally proud of how the government is showing up in 2026 when it comes to a government website. I don't know why we would expect anything less in the United States of America, which right now there is a... By a show of hands, who sort of grimaces when you think about using a government website? Like, "Oh no, I gotta go on that website again." Okay, for those watching, that was about half the room. I'm sure other people are thinking about it. By show of hands, who looks forward to using a government website? One guy. Okay, thank you, sir. Maybe it was one of ours. So that should change. All hands should go up when they look forward to use a government website. We shouldn't expect anything less at this point in 2026.

Right, so I mean, that does bring me to like, the question about one of the things I liked about having this conversation is that we, and you just demonstrated, I don't think frustration in government websites is a partisan issue. I think a lot of this red tape has never been political. It's always been a bureaucratic issue. I'm not a political reporter, therefore I'm not a, you know? So when it comes to the design of these products, how much are you thinking about trust? Building trust, you mentioned briefly before Peter, and like including more people because I think people feel excluded by the process, especially if it's too complicated. It'll take time, to your point about time. Like, how do you measure that? How do you measure success in trust and inclusion?

I could share an anecdote from just last week. I was recruiting a designer and she admitted to me, she goes, "Joe, I just have to tell you, I'm married, but I haven't changed my last name." I go, "Okay." She goes, "Well, it's because I just know it's gonna be so painful to do that on government websites. It's been years I've been married, I still haven't changed my last name." And I thought, "My God, that is just one of the darkest UX patterns that you could think of." A website, just the perception of it being hard, precludes you from even engaging in it. And I think that's like, we're moving beyond this, like enough of that. Like, this is over. Like, people should feel empowered to get the thing done with the government that they need to get done. And so if I were to continue the answer to your question, you know, there's the spirit of Airbnb here, if you think back to what I've learned about how do you take a complicated process, which back in the day getting a vacation rental was not an easy process. You were on Craigslist, you were wiring money to strangers, you had to deal with contracts, email back and forth. We just looked at it and said, "Well, what if we simplified this? What if we just made this easy, delightful, secure, safe, trustworthy, and imbue it with good design that people could get done what they need to get done quickly without the angst and without the anxiety that used to go into that process." I think there's so many parallels to us being able to translate those ideas of simplicity, of clarity. When you're looking at a government website, there's a lot going on. Can we simplify it and help people get to what they're looking for quickly?

Peter, any thoughts on that subject and how you wanna approach it?

Well, the easy answer to how do you measure that is obviously, you know, citizen participation. So if the citizen experience is delightful and interesting and also relevant to the way the culture and society is today, I think there's gonna be a very, very quick and very, very important kind of dissemination of those sites' relevancy and importance in the way we live, and, you know, in people's lives in general. Branding normally tries to sell things from a very commercial point of view. And in this case, what we're trying to do is to have people live in something, which is a very, very unique and interesting case study for what Joe and the team are doing at the National Design Studio. I think also, there's this incredible opportunity to use design to give people new opportunities, find solutions, and also create a lot of excitement around things that truly are boring or difficult at present. And it's not like people over the last 40 years haven't tried and done great jobs. Of course, there's just a lot of systems and functions, et cetera, that work well. It's just that somehow the world has jumped ahead of the opportunities that the government had and I think Joe's putting that back in its rightful place.

Well, and speaking of jumping ahead, I think the advent of generative AI is kind of, like the timing coordinates well with you, but I wanna know, are we gonna start vibe coding government sites? How does that work? You guys all know what vibe coding is, right? When you tell Claude to build your website and it just kind of does and you don't really have to know how that code got there, it just works. I mean, I imagine part of you really wants that to be the solution and part of you knows that there's a lot at risk here to let a bot do that, right? Am I?

Oh, well, thankfully we have, you know, very capable software engineers so they don't have to vibe code. So that's the first part of that.

All software engineers have to vibe code. That's what Mark Zuckerberg said.

Well, yeah, you can enhance, you can accelerate your process with the tools that are emerging right now. But I think there's actually a great example of something that we shipped recently, which, you know, leverages these emerging technologies. So obviously, July 4th this year is the 250th anniversary of the nation. And we were asked to help work on a website called 250.gov, which is a site that shows you all the activities, all the things that you can engage in as an American to celebrate the nation. And so if you go to 250.gov, you can see a way that we've employed some generative features that I think are fairly interesting where, you know, for the first time, I think to our knowledge, this is the first time an AI tool like this has been rolled out in the government where you can actually talk to the website. You can actually say, "Hey, I'm thinking about going to D.C. with my family of three kids. What are the things to do?" And so suddenly we flip the script where it's not me, the citizen, having to go hunt down through websites and look for links and try to find the thing I'm looking for. We flip the script, you tell the website what you need and the website goes and compiles across, you know, the dataset of 250.gov and gives you a generative UI experience of, well, based on a family of three coming for, you know, these dates in the summertime, here are the activities going that are appropriate for kids. And it's packaged right there. It's like an itinerary that's been built for you to help you plan your trip. So there's something very interesting about that. And, you know, with that, the UI, you know, it's not like a chat back and forth. There's actual UI that's compiled in the moment to deliver to you exactly what you're looking for rather than having to go hunt through a bunch of links to try to find it.

Right. Peter, as a longtime visual artist, how do you feel about the fact that Nano Banana can just clone your work and in a second do something that you might've spent weeks or months working on? Does it drive you crazy? Does it give you hope?

No, I think in every generation you just have to accept the realities of what technology is on board. And I think it's very, very difficult, as you know, to replicate imagination. And in the spirit of creativity as a craft, I think that it's great that all these technologies are around us. They do accelerate, make much more efficient the day, to a large extent, if you use them correctly to support ideas and vision. But I don't see, at least in the near future, replication of, so to speak, successful or--

Has their progress stunned you A little bit?

Yes, yes.

'Cause two years ago, three years ago, they couldn't do what they do now.

Yes, but it's difficult to see how the human, at the moment at least, in creativity, imagination, it's very difficult to see how that IP, so to speak, is going to evolve in front of known data.